corrente

Thursday, July 14, 2005

[repost] So Rove outed a CIA operative for political gain. What's the big deal?

This story is now making the mainstream at Kos and Eschaton, so I figured I'd repost this repost from a week ago.

After all, Rove's boss, Dear Leader, outed a CIA mole in Al Qaeda during Election 2004 and nobody said "Boo!"

So I think everybody who's yelling "treason" should just pipe down. Our President and his wise, discerning advisors know what they're doing and we should just trust them. [Damn! Even irony makes my B.S.S. spike! Where's that damn bucket?]

Here are the relevant links from our master "Gaslight Watch" page, where we give the timeline for incidents where Bush politicized "terror" intel to win election 2004 (or, if you prefer, "win" "election" 2004):

08-06-2004 and 08-06-2004 (Bush blows an AQ mole), 08-07-2004 (the Times covers for him), ... 08-08-2004 (Kevin Drum blames liberals for panicking Bush so he outed the mole), 08-09-2004 (Condi says outing a mole is OK when you do it on background), 08-10-2004 (Condi tries to put the toothpaste back in the tube)

NOTE The stories say that "US officials" outed the AQ mole. I wrote Bush on the assumption that Bush is responsible for what his underlings do, and that in any case his underlings don't do things like reveal intelligence sources and methods without checking with their boss. And we all know how Bush feels about leaks....

NOTE Alert reader pansypoo and Google led me to Colonel Sam Gardiner. He connects a lot of the dots. A must read, since it puts Plame and the politicization of intelligence into a much broader context. I'll try to put this in context later today.